


Envy

by themus



Series: 7 Deadly Sins [2]
Category: The OC
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Explicit Language, Gen, Heavy Angst, Non-Explicit Sex, Running Away, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-17
Updated: 2007-08-17
Packaged: 2019-02-23 02:06:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13180107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themus/pseuds/themus
Summary: Seth never stopped Ryan from running away at the beginning of 102 The Model Home.





	Envy

 

 

**ENVY:**

 

_a feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's advantages, success, possessions, etc._

 

 

 

He pulls away from her as soon as he's finished, deep into the shadows of the room, but Jade can hear his heavy breathing as she readjusts her clothes – sweat a sticky line across the back of her thighs where they've been pressed against the window frame.  
  
They never take their clothes off when they fuck. It's not that kind of relationship. Their interactions are always measured in primary colours: the caustic yellow of burning streetlamps and flashing neon signs; the filtered blue of moon-tinted night; the red of flushed skin against skin.

  
The streets turn everything sharp – isolation the worst. There's nothing like being invisible in a city of half a million people to make a person lonely. Eventually you learn to snatch what you can get – five minutes of physical closeness in a day, a week, a month, shutting your eyes and pretending yourself into a place where there is emotion attached. Loneliness is at once a stabbing pain and a burning wound that eats at a person until they become empty inside; hollow.

She hears him zip up his tatty jeans, facing away from her, even though she can barely see the shape of him in the dark. Jade pushes herself off the cold concrete wall and walks up to him, tennis shoes padding oh-so-quietly, like she's walking on air. He becomes more defined as she joins him in the shadows; broad shape turns into texture, shade into bleached colour.

His heat seeps into her arm when she brushes up against him, fingers dipping into his back pocket. She can smell him now, and he smells of cheap soap and smoke and the slight saccharine of whiskey. He was in the back room of the bar again tonight, earning his keep at the poker table, and Jade can feel the crumpled edges of a wad of bills behind the cigarette packet as she slips it out and spins away from him, swapping the packet palm to palm.

He lunges forward and grabs her wrist, arresting her movement.

“Hold it.” His fingers curl into her pulse point and she can feel the veins beating against his ragged nails. His face is set still; hard jaw, hard blue eyes. Just like the night they met. Except that his bruises have almost faded now, replaced slowly by a slight hollow around the eyes, skin pulled just a little too tight over cheekbones.

Jade slips on a half-smile, relents, hands the packet back to him, two cigarettes already lodged under the cuff of her thin jacket. “Don't know you how do it, Kid,” she tells him, letting the smile grace her lips for a few more seconds. No one had caught her for years, until him.

He doesn't smile back. Kid never smiles. But he fumbles with the lighter in one hand, and the flame, when it bursts, is a sharp glare in the dim room.

They smoke in silence – Kid sinking to the room's single bare mattress, his arm resting across his knee. The cigarette end glows, disembodied, a fragile beacon of life.

Across the street a car pulls up, idling at the crossroads, and the headlamps cut a wide beam of white light through the bare window. Two blocks down kids are selling themselves on corners for fifty bucks a pop. It's not uncommon for cars to stop here, the occupants building up courage and pushing down guilt until eventually one of them wins. Sometimes they are there for hours.

Kid is staring blankly at the opposite wall, half his face caught in the light, the other shuttered into pervasive shadow. Sometimes he looks too old for this life, filled with painful wisdom. Now he just looks young, shrunken and reduced; too young to own those dead eyes and that permanent attitude of stoic acceptance.

Jade battles with herself for a long moment, fully aware that she's about to break the most important rule of the streets. But the knowledge is already thick in her mind and she can't do nothing, not this time; it wouldn't be right. So she pulls the wallet from her jacket pocket, letting sensitive fingertips slide across the smooth leather. “I’ve got something you’re gonna want to see,” she says, and tosses the wallet across the room. Kid catches it awkwardly, not expecting it, the cigarette flipping with sudden movement in his hand and snapping against his knuckle.

Jade allows herself another smile; it’s almost impossible to catch Kid off-guard.

“What’s this?” He’s looking at the wallet suspiciously, like he’s not sure yet that it's not going to explode in his face.

And the thing is that Jade’s not sure either. But she has to know. “Picked it today. Open it.” She never keeps the wallets, the purses, the credit cards, the creased pictures of loved ones. She just takes the cash, throws the rest away. Except this time.

Kid is frowning as he flips the wallet open, losing interest in the cigarette which still burns in his left hand. And then he freezes cold. Everything – his face, his eyes, his hands - his entire body stills; prey, sensing danger, camouflaging himself by absolute immobilisation. Then his tongue darts out to wet his lips and he seems to remember the cigarette, tapping at it to dislodge the ash onto the floor. “He’s . . . ?”

He's here? That's what Kid wants to ask. Except that for some reason he doesn't want to say that word.

Jade cuts the hanging sentence loose with a decisive, “Yeah.” There's more of that impossible stillness, and Jade watches his face carefully, searching for a signal, but instead of the fear she is expecting there is confusion, as if this turn of events is completely unforeseen. “He was handing out flyers.”

She fishes around in her pocket for the much-folded copy the man gave her. Kid is unmistakable even in a suit and tie, looking out past the camera, ignorant of the photograph being taken. It’s the same face, though without the sallowness of constant undernourishment, and the hair is considerably shorter. There was no expense spared on these things – each and every one a good quality colour copy. “Ryan Atwood,” Jade reads, “last seen August 3rd, Newport Beach, California, boarding a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas.”

For a brief second Kid’s face contorts to anger and he looks down, letting out a heavy breath through his nose.

Jade slides her feet a little further apart, physically bracing herself to say the words, "Maybe you should go home.”

Kid freezes again and his eyes slip closed, like he's too tired for the pain thinking about home brings. Shit, Jade knows that feeling, inside out and upside down.

“Did he ever hit you, mess with you?” she asks, blunting her words on purpose, because she can't afford to fuck around here, she can't afford to dance around the truth on this one. But she knows the answer before he gives it. Jade knows people, she can read the abusers by the looks on their faces, that anger in the eyes that lies behind all their other emotions. And the man she lifted the wallet off, he looked nothing but scared and desperate. Hell, he'd come all the way from California to hand out flyers because of one tiny, month-old lead.

And sure enough Kid sighs tiredly and mutters a disgusted, “No.”

“Then what's stopping you?” she presses. Kid has dropped the cigarette now and it's burning itself out on the scarred concrete while he screws the palms of his hands into his eyes. He looked exhausted the first time she saw him, and Jade isn't so blind that she can pretend he's ever stopped looking that way. Kid doesn't sleep properly, doesn't eat properly, spends hours in dimly-lit and smoky rooms counting cards so he can afford to buy a coffee and a hot meal at a restaurant for the next few weeks.

That shouldn't be anyone's life.

Jade sits back on the window sill. The glass is broken at the top and she can hear the chugging of the car outside, still idling there, fighting guilt.

“Look, whatever argument you had, whatever went wrong, whatever you felt you needed to escape . . . it's done now. It's over. It's time for you to go home and be thankful that at least you still have one.” The words are harsh, but Jade has never been able to pull her punches, not when it comes to this, because she knows the streets, and she's all too aware that this is literally life and death. There are too many kids out there already, and the streets claim them all, one way or another. Just like they claimed her.

And he's riding the same wave that she rode, almost three years ago, except that evidently it's not too late for _him_ to get out safely, while she's already drowning.

Kid is shaking his head, a tiny movement back and forth. “I can't. I can't do that.”

“Because of your plan?” Jade says, and her anger is becoming evident in her voice now. Kid has a home, people to go back to, and he won't. And she . . . she wouldn't go back, but she would give anything, _anything_ , to be wanted.

He looks up at her in surprise. “My  . . . plan?” he repeats, hesitantly.

“I know how much money you make at poker every week, and I know you could be renting a motel room and eating real food every day if you wanted. But you're not, which means you're saving up for something, which means you have a plan.”

He looks startled at her revelation and Jade can't help but feel a little galled that he'd think her so stupid, that he honestly thought she didn't notice the amount he was bringing in on game nights.

Jade crosses her arms loosely, leaning her shoulders back against the cold glass. “I'm gonna give you my advice for free, Kid – get on Greyhound's Home Free programme, and if you really hate it back there you can get yourself emancipated, get a job and use the money you saved for a deposit on an apartment. But you can't stay here.”

Kid's eyes sparkle with anger again, flashing a dangerous blue in her direction. His chest is moving a little faster now, and he crosses his arms too, folding in on himself. The first time Kid did that – his stress reaction – Jade was scared that he would pull himself inward too heavily and collapse, that his emotional overload would implode him. Maybe she's still afraid of that.

“I . . . _can't_ stay here,” he repeats her words again, and there's an edge to his voice now that Jade has only heard once before, right before he pounded a strung-out junkie into the ground for pulling a knife on her.

She lowers her head, deepening eye contact. “Look, I know that whatever reason you left, you felt it was serious. But there's a line, Kid, in your head, and once you cross it you can't ever go back home.”

Don't fuck up your life over this, she wants to tell him. Don't stay. Or you'll still be here when you're thirty, only you'll look fifty. And one day you'll be shot or stabbed or beaten to death and no one will even notice.

Kid doesn't answer and eventually Jade looks away, taking a breath and pushing herself upright again. “I've got work to do,” she says, zipping up her jacket again as she slips out the door.

She doesn't bother looking back and Kid doesn't say goodbye. It's not that kind of relationship either.

Jade walks a couple of long blocks North before she stops to find a payphone. Most of them are heavily graffitied; the territorial markings of the urban jungle. The paint is still wet on the one she chooses, and when she pulls the phone from the cradle the tacky neon green swipes itself along her sleeve.

She hesitates before punching in the number, afraid she is making the wrong decision. But her parents never even reported her missing, yet this man came all the way to Las Vegas to look for Kid. And maybe she wants this for him because she knows she'll never have it for herself. Something needs to be done before it's much too late.

And the clock is rapidly ticking down.

Jade dials, punching in the numbers straight from memory. The call goes directly to voicemail. She leaves a message, telling the man the address of her squat, saying Kid will be there all night. Then she hangs up and walks away. As she reaches the other side of the street the payphone rings, the sound sudden and urgent in the darkness, but Jade keeps walking.  She walks until the ringing stops, leaving a tingling echo in the cold night air, and the flashing neon of downtown envelops her.

And when she goes home - with the dawn light sparkling golden on the cracked windows, with crumpled fives and tens and twenties stuffed into the pocket of her pants -  Kid is gone, and her world is empty again.

 


End file.
